How convenient it would have been for everyone if engineers
could move a few things around on the proven F-86 Sabre and come up with the
Air Force’s first truly supersonic fighter.
They certainly tried. The problem
was they could never overcome the liability of the Sabre’s 30o swept
wing. The F-86 just wasn’t going to make
the grade so North American, makers of the F-86 and the legendary P-51 Mustang,
was just going to have to clear off its drawing boards and start over from
scratch. They came up with a jet that
was all new. For starts, it had a 45o
sweep to its wing. The pilot who first took
the plane out bet someone two beers that it would break the sound barrier on
its initial flight. He won his bet.

CH-53, like one here, retrieved down jets in Vietnam

The F-100 was fast – certainly meeting the Air Force’s
requirements of a fighter that would go supersonic while sustaining level
flight. The Soviet counterpart to this
new Super Sabre would actually go faster but it had a different design
philosophy. Russian engineers were
willing to sacrifice range for speed and maneuverability and they got what they
wanted in this third generation, light-weight MiG jet. The F-100 earned its respect, as it turns out,
as a rugged ground attack aircraft. It
literally did some serious heavy lifting with more than a couple tons of
ordinance hanging from its wings.

F-100D in ground attack mission over Vietnam

The ultimate expression of this fighter-bomber was the
F-100D and it slung a lot of mud striking targets in the jungles of
Vietnam. People will always talk about
the treacherous missions that Phantom and Thud pilots took in Operation Rolling
Thunder north of the DMZ. Rightly so – these
pilots took great risks and a lot of these guys didn’t return home, not for
quite a while… some never. Yet, what do
we know of the F-100’s role in that war?
Fact is the F-100 flew more combat missions in Vietnam than any other
aircraft. In the space of five years –
1964 to 1969 – the four wings of Super Sabres stationed in Vietnam flew more
sorties that 50,000 P-51 Mustangs did in all of World War II. That’s 360,000 sorties if you’re keeping
count. It cost the Air Force 186 planes,
mostly due to ground fire south of the DMZ.
The Super Sabre just didn’t have the needed range like the newer F-4s
and F-105s.

Super Sabre drops Snake-eye Retarded Bomb

Most pilots liked flying the F-100. It was robust, handling was decent and its
systems were generally reliable. It did
have its faults, as you would expect. The
first generation of these aircraft, the F-100A, had a nasty tendency to break
up in mid-air. The aircraft was grounded
in 1954. It turns out that pulling out
of a hard dive created stability problems that wrenched apart the airframe. The problem was solved by giving the jet a
larger fin and longer wings. One problem
that was never adequately addressed was the tricky nature of landing the
plane. The pilot had to keep his focus
or risk stalling his jet or have it roll at a very inopportune time. You had to come in fast and rely on your drag
chute to keep from running off the runway.
It’s been described as a controlled crash. Sounds like a carrier landing, doesn’t
it. Think about this: there were 1274
F-100Ds produced and over 500 of them were lost to accidents. You just can’t sugarcoat a fact such as
this. No one tries to – they just don’t
talk about it. Maybe a lot has to do
with the difficulty in keeping them maintained.
It’s the Cold War. Everyone takes
risks. Stuff happens.